Best practices for proactive security testing

© 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Best practices for proactive security testing

S E C 2 1 5 - R

Kevin Higgins

Senior Cloud Infrastructure Architect

Amazon Web Services

Agenda

Introduction to threat modeling

Exercise—threat modeling AWS architectures

Demo

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Threat modeling

What is threat modeling?

Process and methodologies

Components of a threat modelAssets and information flows (Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, data)

System edges and entry points

External dependencies and assumptions

Classes of actors and action/trust (app users, admin, services)

Threat model outputRisks and mitigations

Simple 3-tier applicationAWS account

VPC

Amazon EC2

Elastic Load Balancing

Amazon RDS

Bucket with

objects

Amazon

CloudFront

Amazon Route 53

Application

users

Cloud

architects

Developers,

DBAs, testers

Objectives:

1. Security group not

open to 0.0.0.0/0

2. S3 bucket not publicly

readable/writable

3. Amazon EBS and

Amazon RDS are

encrypted

4. All admins access AWS

account via SAML-

based federation

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AWS components

Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3

Let’s enumerate threats to these components in isolation

List out AWS constructs that represent trust boundaries

For each threat, let us enumerate a directive by policy, preventive, detective, and responsive countermeasures to reduce the risk

Let us develop a test case/acceptance criteria along the lines of BDD

© 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

© 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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© 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Kevin Higgins

[email protected]

© 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.